The community has waited for years, now it’s finally here: Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate (MH3U)! As a Monster Hunter enthusiast from day one, I was really looking forward to this title. I loved Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (MHFU), but got kind of turned off by Monster Hunter Tri, which featured surprisingly little Monsters and gear. Don’t get me wrong, it was a very good game, but it just didn’t seem as addictive as as it’s predecessor. Also playing on the Wii always seemed a little inconvenient and clumsy (and that’s coming from a guy who used to play MHFU online with a PSP and Ad-Hoc Party).

Anyway, having seen some (a lot) of trailers of the game, I was quite confident that this extension to the series would probably call up the same enthusiasm I had with MHFU. After having played it for a good 12 hours (on the Nintendo 3DS, I can’t really afford a Wii U and the game -_-), I’m sure that this is a videogame I’m going to spend a lot of time with. It has everything that makes the series what it is (huge weapons, even bigger Monsters, a beautiful scenery,…) and Capcom also managed to make some major improvements to make the game more beginner friendly. However I found this almost a bit too much. Having to rebuild the camp base at Moga after having played the previous titles for (literally) hundreds of hours, just wasn’t much fun. However the combat system has become a lot more fast paced and dynamic, which kind of changes how you experience the game, but in a good way.

Generally I would say that, compared to earlier installments of the series, this one really tries to give beginners the smoothest possible entry to the Monster Hunter-verse. While MHF, MHF2 and MHFU basically just threw you in a world populated with monsters, MH3U tries hard (at least in single player mode) to wove a story into the whole collecting- and killing-business. Also the battles have become more spontaneous and flexible. Whereas in MHFU you could pretty much tell what move a monster would make every time, MH3U makes this a lot more difficult. The beasts move faster and have lots of variations to their attacking patterns; so it’s not always easy to find a sure-win-strategy.

Overall MH3U is a worthy new entry to the series and will make the wait for Monster Hunter 4 so much more enjoyable!